


Beautiful Things Don't Ask For Attention

by thedenouement



Series: beautiful things [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Enemies, Post-High School, Upper East Side, and falling in love, but like they hate each other, everyone's petty and rich and gay, so rivals with benefits, they're both stubborn and it's complicated, who end up tripping on their feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-04-25 19:59:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14386041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedenouement/pseuds/thedenouement
Summary: Lexa Woods doesn’t do friends. She does debate finals and scholars dinners and her father’s company galas—anything to keep her on track to early admissions to Yale while navigating the wealthy but irrelevant daughters of New York’s finest. Namely, Clarke Griffin who arrives largely oblivious to the ins and out of the Upper East Side, and is quick to steal the crown from Lexa’s head and quicker to make her question herself.or, the uesau where Clarke and Lexa go from enemies to friends-with-benefits to hopelessly tripping over their feelings.





	1. How To Be A Sweet Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a continuation/expansion/rewrite of Red, White and Blues In The Skies and though you don’t have to read that before this, you might want to to gain some context. Each chapter of this will flick between the past – how their rivalry and then their relationship started – and the present with them spending their final summer of high school together and preparing to go to college.

For what it was worth, Lexa didn’t make a habit of being distracted by pretty girls.

Distractions beget negligence and Yale didn’t hand out acceptance letters based on participation and goodwill, but let it be known that the summer of her Senior year was the one a Wood’s went back on their word.

(It was a wonder the angels hadn’t descended from heaven, if she were honest).

She considered the odds of this as she entered the kitchen, hand skating over the thick slab marble countertop. The drapes had been pulled, the shutters parted so that the clean, white lines and steel appliances of the kitchen glower in the angle of the nine o’clock sun. The French doors off the informal dining area were thrown open to the paved patio, wicker furniture lined with the trimmed gardens of their four-acre property on the Southampton waterfront where her parents would breakfast in the mornings on espressos and the company quarterly's.

It was an old property – the Woods’ were an old family. But her father had poured year-and-a-halves earnings into the aging halls of the house her grandfather had built for a nine-month renovation when she was fifteen that had left clean white lines and revived paintwork in its wake, plush wool carpet, heavy drapes, ensuite’s with every bedroom. Modern artwork in the lofty living areas which basked in the newly acquired light of the skylights and expensive fittings. Elizabeth liked to scrape specks of non-existent dust off the sprawling sofa’s like the house and shuffle the copies of _‘Vogue’_ on the coffee tables like it was a show home but Lexa paid her mother no heed with her micromanaging and compulsive likeability. Both fortunately and unfortunately, she had inherited her father’s sombre diplomacy. Choosing not to traipse her friends through their atrium in light dresses and designer sunglasses, and rather busy herself with the likes of Anya and Lincoln, telling herself college students were more stimulating conversation than her peers.

Lexa didn't have friends, anyway, she had acquaintances and she had Anya.

(And she had Clarke).

Carding a hand through sex tousled locks, she perused the breakfast options set out on the nearest corner of the sprawling island, feeling the sea-salty cross-breeze as it curled against her, cooling the silk of the robe tie precariously at her waist – the remnant touch of her illicit liaison sat like humming electricity under her skin.

There were pastries on the breakfast tray – croissants and brioche from the bakery, pulp free orange juice. Lexa searched the cupboards and splashed what was left of the half bottle of Dom Perignon into the juice, watching the bubbles rise to the rim of the glass in a thick, fizzing layer before deflating. The pastry flaked under her fingers as she began to pick one apart.

Her parents would disapprove of her drinking in the morning. But her parents had departed yesterday when an investor had called them back to the city for a business proposition, leaving their thirteen-year-old son, Aden in Cancun where he was summering with the Woods’ family friends, and Lexa with Maria and instructions to meet Titus – their ill-meaning, balding-and-in-denial godfather – at the club for a Sunday brunch she had made the executive decision to be absent for. She liked to think the events of the Fourth had emboldened her.

“Are things to your liking, Miss Lexa?”

The brunette didn't try to stash the – now empty – champagne bottle as she turned to extend gratitude to their housekeeper, a middle-aged woman in a starched uniform, hair on the verge of greying at the crown. She had a listing eastern European accent that slid in and out of hard American drawl and a knowing expression under softly aging features.

“Yes,” Lexa nodded, “thank you Maria.” She fingered the peeling label on the bottle-green champagne bottle from where the condensation had eased the adhesive, deflecting under the woman’s look – the woman who had watched her summer-time evolutions from a graceless pre-teen, bird-mouthed and too serious who kept the perfunctory two feet from Anya on their Hamptons jaunts, to the woman on the brink of the Ivy League. It felt suddenly like a burden too big to bear.

“Miss Lexa?”

“Hm?” she retracted her hand like a scolded child.

“Is anything the matter? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Oh,” She shook her head so that her hair fell over her collarbone, tips dancing over the thin line of red bruises marring her skin she was sure Maria could see, “I’m fine.” The look the woman gave her made her falter and she deflated, sinking into her hip against the cool counter, fisting fingers in the slippery fabric of her robe. “Do you ever feel as though things are going too fast?”

Maria grunted. “Miss Lexa, I blink and you’re going to college. This always go too fast, what matters is what you make of them.” She pursed her lips, eyebrow arched in a special kind of challenge – the kind she would present when she caught a twelve-year-old Lexa in her mother’s walk-in, reverent hands slipping over silky dresses and chemises with want. The woman wasn’t one for nonsense, it suited a pragmatic Lexa well and her stiff-collared father even better, though Maria had assured Lexa she liked her most.

“Okay?” the woman checked.

Lexa nodded, amusement turning her lips up. “Okay,” she agreed picking up the tray as the woman went to leave, duster in hand. “Oh, and Maria?”

“Yes?”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about –” she gestured upstairs with a jerk of her head, “– this.”

 _‘Anyone’_ meant her parents, but Maria understood. She tapped a finger against her nose once with a conspiratorial smile and retreated to the living room, leaving Lexa to climb the arching staircase to the lofty second storey, toes skimming through the puddles of sunlight inking carpet.

There was a serenity to a morning without her parents that Lexa enjoyed. A lack of her mother’s micromanaging and her father’s absent request from the dark wood furnished interior of his downstairs den – the easy knowledge of a weekend free of requirements and full of _other_ matters. She slipped through the crack in her bedroom door, setting the tray on the side of the bed she had vacated where the comforter was tossed back. Then, crossed the room to pull the drapes, watching with fondness as the body in her bed writhed against the sudden light, moaning into the frothy folds of the comforter.

“Morning.”

Clarke tossed her head against the pillow, replying with a husky groan and Lexa let her robe cascade onto the carpet in a puddle of grey-blue silk, traversing the expanse of bed between them to sling a leg over the blonde’s hips, pressing hands to sink into the pillows on either side of her head. “No,” Clarke hummed, pressing into the soft crook of Lexa’s elbow.

“I come bearing mimosa’s,” Lexa wagered, mirth in her lips as she watched the slow flutter of lashes on cheeks.

The morning coloured Clarke’s eyes a blearily cobalt and Lexa pressed a kiss to the line of her jawbone, the arch of her nose, the corner of her lips until Clarke pushed her off and she rolled onto her back, mimosa’s splashing the sheets that Lexa would strip for Maria to wash later. She sat up to pick at her half-eaten pastry, watching the blonde ease herself out of the folds of the comforter, fumbling for the silk slip she had abandoned on the floor last night.

“Remind me again why you’re a morning person?” she slipped the dress over her head, freeing her hair from a plunging neckline and spaghetti straps.

“My parents like to think idle time is the root of our failings.”

“Ah,” the blonde remembered. She sat up and combed parted fingers through her hair, surveying the evidence of their night; the lacy lingerie, the sundresses smelling like chlorine from where their hair had dripped down their backs from a day lounging in seclusion around the Woods’ pool. Clarke’s parents thought she was at the Blakes’. The Blake’s in turn assumed she was at home. It was a flawed plan in all honestly, a thin tightrope they had resolved to walk that was little more than the knife-edge they teetered on before, only with less viability to break them both.

Really, nothing had changed.

They were still stealing kisses in the gilded bathroom of the club in tennis whites and court shoes, Lexa’s skin browning in the sun, Clarke’s hair lightening at the tips. Still disgracing the sofas of guests houses while their friends drunk fizzing champagne and talked through last semesters gossip. There was still a violent tension there in the moments between curling fingers around wrists and pulling each other into the dark, discarding clothes like professionals and traversing bodies like only you could do with someone you had history with.

(And what a history they had).

But it was softer and Lexa felt like she had room to breathe for the first time since the fourth grade.

“My parents called earlier.” Lexa said and watched Clarke lounge against the headboard, alcohol fizzing on her tongue. “They won’t be back until Monday evening now and Aden sends his regards.”

Clarke smiled lazily, “and how’s Mexico treating the rug rat?”

“He says he’s met a girl. She’s from California.”

“That will impress The Parents.”

Lexa smiled, inclined to agree. It never failed to amuse her how Clarke, rather accurately, referred to her parents like an entity unto their own. “He won’t be back until August.”

“Good,” Clarke decreed putting her food down to slide a hand up Lexa’s arm, over her shoulder, curling possessively at the nape of her neck where her pinkie finger caught on the knots there. It was an action leftover from their days of nail marks under the low backs of silk dresses but Lexa shivered and Clarke bit her lip. “Means I get you to myself.”

Lexa hummed, settling herself into the linens. Long oblongs of sunlights stretched from the bi-fold doors to the bed and she wiggled her toes to feet it against her skin, curling her fingers into the silk of Clarke’s slip.

“You’re touchy this morning,” the blonde smiled.

Lexa traced figure-eight’s around her hip bone. “I’m feeling contemplative,” she informed her. The resounding _‘uh oh’_ came as a chuckle from Clarke’s throat and they lay twisted in each other, sipping mimosas and pulling flaking pasties apart on the white sheets. Her body felt hazy and time slugged by at a pace unto its own – summer moved differently than the rest of the year, Lexa had decided, like a separate dimension of nautical stripes and white-painted bistros but unlike previous years, Lexa found herself surprisingly okay with it. She didn’t want the feeling of Clarke on her to end.

And so, when Clarke’s phone started its obnoxious symphony from somewhere under the striped linen sundress Lexa had stripped off of her the afternoon before, it was a jarring and unwanted return to normal life, ringing in her ears well after the tone had stopped.

Clarke cursed as she missed it, sliding off the bed in search of the device and it sounded filthy.

Eyes closed, Lexa listened to the _‘clack’_ of manicured nails against the screen. A second later, the mattress dipped sideways and Clarke returned, lips fastening themselves to Lexa’s collarbone, darkening the marks she had left their last night. The brunette moaned into the sting of teeth, head fuzzy.

“What’d the girls want?”

She assumed it was them, Octavia and Raven hadn’t laid their hands on their friend since last Tuesday when she had organised a girls’ brunch at the club at the same time Lexa had tennis doubles with Anya scheduled.

(And not, she insisted, just so she could sit on the balcony and ogle at her girlfriend in too-short tennis whites, but the dark wood walls of the ladies’ locker rooms afterwards were likely to tell a different story).

Clarke tossed her head. “A night out,” she answered, “Bellamy’s in Greece and Aurora isn’t giving Octavia her space.”

Grinning, Lexa played with the strap of dark silk against the skin of her shoulder. “I can imagine,” she smirked at the same time as swallowing the intense, claustrophobic thought of leaving the sanctuary they had created out of the gated expanse of her family’s property. The white gravel drive, the soft-sand beach, the trimmed lawn, echoey halls and expansive pool she likened to her safe haven, and she had to fight not to indulge the need to pull Clarke close and hold her there.

Society was ruthless. Lexa didn’t want it to kill them.

Sensing this, Clarke softened, draping herself against the brunette, cool hands and warm lips. “So,” she kissed the spot under Lexa’s jaw where the scent of perfume lingered, “what are we going to do tonight?”

“I thought the girls wanted to go out?”

Clarke shrugged. “They do,” she flicked the strap of Lexa’s bra, “but _you_ don’t.” Lexa pressed into the touch, leaning so that their foreheads met, hair tickling cheeks and breath hot. After years of so-called hatred and glares over cafeteria lunches, the thought that Clarke knew her was a feeling she would want to get used to for her whole life over. She quirked her lips and swallowed the terror. “I can be persuaded.”

“Really?”

Lexa nodded. She would call Anya for drinks and wait until their respective friends were tipsy and self-absorbed before pulling Clarke by the wrist into a secluded corner where no one could see them and they could be each other’s. Their usual routine, except planned this time instead of fuelled on the spontaneous kind of tension that sat on her chest and threatened to choke her when she would watch the blonde in clinging clothes at high school parties. The more she looked back, the more foolish she became in her own eyes – stubborn and callow to the highest degree. She wished she could slap herself out of the badge be-decked blazer that had been formative to her early school years.

“I can’t have my girl alcohol depraved.”

Clarke knocked back her mimosa. She scoffed, “never, in this house.”

“The Woods’ are known to enjoy the finer things,” Lexa admitted.

“The three-hundred-dollar finer things.”

Lexa hummed, remembering the bottle of aged liquor a board member had supplied her father with for a dinner party, in its coloured glass bottle with its prestigious seal. It was excessive spending, she knew, but that was the life they lived, excessive and superficial and so apparently meaningless; a bubble of town cars and burgundy plaid, the debate finals of their aged school halls that would be unceremoniously popped with the coming fall. She leaned up to press turned up lips to Clarke’s temple. “It’s our last summer,” she resolved, “you deserve to be indulged.”  

Biting her lip, Clarke grinned, “if I’d known you were so chivalrous, Lexa Woods, I would have stopped having hate sex with you in Junior Year.”

“We all have our regrets.”

* * *

The lofty rooms of the Woods’ house were a sanctuary when they themselves weren’t there – airy hallways and trimmed gardens, pool water rippling in the simmering afternoon breeze that curled against them through the flung open bi-folds in Lexa’s bedroom. It felt largely more curated that the Griffin residence, a mile down the same stretch of white sand beach and conveniently adjacent to the Blake’s. That property rattled with a constant flow of summer visitors, a house of well-intended, well-funded chaos and as such, ruining the sanctity of the Woods’ residence as they got ready was largely more satisfying.

“There’s a last season Chanel in here,” Lexa hummed, picking through the hanging racks of clutches and handbags in her mother's walk-in – a veritable gold mine of couture and accessories Elizabeth had curated – and there was something inherently rebellious about rifling through her mother’s clothes that Lexa thought she was missing from her middle school years.

Anya had replied to an earlier plea to come out with her with a _‘give me the address’_ and to her left in her parents’ ensuite, Clarke picked through the lipsticks littering the vanity, testing a flashy red colour on the inside of her wrist, then leaning into the sink to apply. Lexa slung on a faux-fur jacket for the fun of it, considering herself in the gilt mirror.

“Pretty,” Clarke threw her a look.

Lexa took her bottom lip between her teeth and shucked the jacket off, letting it fall to the floor and she crossed the threshold of the bathroom to slide her arms around the blonde’s waist. Clarke laughed and squirmed away from her to turn in her grip. Face to face the dusky light cut sharp lines across Clarke’s face and her highlight shined. “You should feel contemplative more often,” she set the lipstick on the vanity and curled her arms around Lexa’s neck, “I like it.”

Lexa smiled.

(She didn’t).

* * *

 The club – chosen unsurprisingly by Octavia with her penchant for knowing the latest and greatest of their social scene – was an exclusive one with velvety interiors that attracted their kind like moths to flame. Young heirs and heiresses in this seasons essentials downing alcohol and telling black waiters to _‘put it on the tab’._

Lexa fiddled with the zipper of her bag, slipping her ID – a well-crafted fake that stated she turned twenty-one last May – into the pocket and watched Clarke envelope Octavia in a greeting hug, then moving to Raven. The playful squeeze Clarke gave Lexa’s hand before shouldering into the depths of the club goers lingered on her skin and the blonde glanced over her shoulder as she was dragged to the bar, hand tangled with Octavia’s, shooting Lexa a weighted look – an apology, a reassurance, a promise.

It was a mutual decision, made in the privacy and darkness of the back of the car on the way there, that they would keep this quiet.

(Though Lexa wasn’t entirely sure what mutual was anymore. She thought they had a mutual hatred for each other and she was wrong. Clarke had a funny tendency to go along with things and rebel at will. It made things all the more tangled).

They resolved something as new and delicate needed to be cultivated into something sturdier than they were or it would die amongst the gossip circles and criticism of _’friends’_ behind back turned palms. And thought that they would become a summer fling destined to die come September made Lexa sick to her stomach as she watched her girlfriend disappear into the fray, eyes for her only.

Adjusting her clinging skirt around her thighs, Lexa spotted Anya draped over the leather seats of a circular booth, swilling a pricey looking drink around her glass. She shouldered over and stole a sip, grimacing at the strength of the drink, sliding into the booth opposite her friend.

Grunting, Anya finished the drink, the glass sweating in her hands as she surveyed the club, the bass thrumming under their skin. “This is the place intelligent conversation comes to die,” she decreed.

Lexa slipped her bag off of her shoulder, “it’s not that bad.” But even as she spoke a rowdy group of well-dressed boys – collared shirts and expensive jeans – spilt alcohol across the bar which a waiter sprung to mop up.

They cheered.

John Murphy, resident Chuck Bass but smarmier, shot her a wink and Lexa swore she could feel her stomach turn in repulsion. She looked back across the table to face the elder girl’s _‘I told you so.’_

“I thought you swore off clubbing,” Anya asked dangerously.

“My parents are in the city,” Lexa replied, rubbing the ache from the bass beat out of her temples, “I needed a drink.”

The elder girl guffawed, “Lexa Woods the party girl? Who knew freeing you from your prep school play would render you so liberal?” Lexa rolled her eyes, crossing her legs within the constraints of the skirt Clarke had picked out for her with a coy flutter of eyelashes, helpless as deft fingers snatched the fake ID nosing out of her bag where it rested on the table. “And with a fake too,” her friend _‘tsked’_ looking scandalised – which was a joke because it was she who took Lexa to her first high school party. A penthouse affair in the hotel two streets from her building, where drunk teenagers spilled form the double-doored suite and the bellboys despaired for the wallpaper.

The elder girl clasped a hand to her chest even so, “what would Daddy say?”

When Lexa didn’t reply, only leant over the table with a pointed, disgruntled look to snatch the ID, Anya stood.

“I’m getting a drink,” Anya informed Lexa, then navigated through the sea of gyrating bodies, returning three minutes later to slide into the booth with two Kamikaze’s in martini glasses. She set them on the table and watched Lexa sip.

The talked meaningless things. It felt like an easy escape and reassurance her world hadn’t been flung entirely off its axis as they picked out girls in their respective classes and speculated about their plans for the fall. But small talk wasn’t Anya’s forte, and Lexa could tell she was winding up for the bigger question she brought up when their second round of drinks arrived on the hand of a bow-tied water with a quirked half-smile.

“So,” the elder girl stirred the concoction with a manicured index finger and Lexa watched the liquid slosh, like roiling seas and the way her stomach felt. “How have you been.” The clear and present ulterior motive reminded her of when she was younger, sitting at the table with the head chair free because her father was late in the office and her mother was simmering. He didn’t do it anymore – a manila envelope served to him in his study late one night was threat enough to get him home before seven – but even when he did Elizabeth would kiss him on the cheek and ask him how his day was, and Lexa would wonder why people rarely ever said what they meant.

“Good,” she enunciated slowly in answer. “You saw me at the club.” It was occurring to her that this she might have knowing walked into a ply to get her to talk – vodka and triple sec wasn’t her drink of choice and she could already feel the effects of the first round and a half going to her head. The music felt thick, humming behind her teeth and in the shell of her ears.

“That was a week ago, and even then, you were distracted.”

Lexa pressed her lips into a thin, glossed line, refusing to answer.

“Who’s the newest summer conquest?” The girl prodded again, knowing full-well her friend refrained from such an indulgence, while Lexa herself twisted the base of her glass with a forefinger and a thumb thinking of the irony.

“You know as well as I there’s no one.”

Anya looked dubious. “Has anyone ever told you not to lie?”

“My father, on many occasions.”

“You should listen to him.”

A laugh went up near the bar and Anya recoiled, a visceral reaction, shoulders curving inwards under the weight of disgust she didn't try to mask. “Don’t look now.” Her lips curled around the rim of her cocktail, turned up like the taste was foul.

In a rambunctious round of tequila shots, Octavia and Raven had slung themselves over each other. Steadying her drink friends, Clarke sent Lexa a wink that had heat squirming to her stomach, and, the brunette thought, _‘keeping this quiet’_ was going to be harder than she thought. Especially when the rush in her ears was louder than the words Anya was speaking.

“No shame,” the girl seethed as Raven pounded the bar for another.

Lexa straightened, the urge to defend welling in her chest like the foam of a king tide. She picked her nail. “Steady, Anya,” she warned, “just because they bet you at your game in the eighth grade.” For two girls with four years’ separation, Lexa never failed to find the at-odds relationship Clarke and Anya had strange. Surely, they could have ignored each other? They didn’t run in the same circles like Clarke and Lexa did.

“You just wait. Come September we won’t have to see her. She can toddle off to California and be done with it.”

“Must you?”

The reality of the situation weighed on Lexa heavier that the idle thought it had been this morning – like it had spent the day building and morphing in her chest while she distracted herself. California felt miles away. They hadn’t spoke about Clarke’s college plans since her mindless plea on the fourth, half out of her mind with Clarke’s body on hers, and her fingers itched with the certainty of it. It made her nervous.

“Come off your high horse, Lexa, it’s what you want.”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

“Since when?”

Lexa didn’t know if it was desperation or fury but whatever this feeling was it made her head fuzzy with the need for it to be gone. She stood so violently it rattled the tables, transparent liquid threatening the rim of the shallow glasses. “I’m not in the mood, Anya!”

“Well.” Her friend drew herself up, slinking out of the velvety booth with the elongated grace Lexa had lacked, toying with the stem of her cocktail. She cocked her head and considered the brunette with an imperceptible eye, but Lexa wasn’t paying attention to the smile she stored in the minute curve of her lips. She shrugged nonchalantly, “call me when you are.”

Lexa watched her leave. A low muscle in her jaw ticked.

She disliked fighting with Anya. It left a sour taste in her mouth like it did when they would fight as children – a frequent event seeing as the elder chose to associate herself with a precocious girl four years her younger. She refused to acknowledge the fact that it might be because, aside from Clarke, Anya was her only confidant because a Woods’ didn’t need friends.

(Even the motto drilled into her felt like a sickly film on her tongue).

The strength of reigning herself in was going to drain her down to her bones, but the utter terror of outing themselves kept her standing, not to mention the vodka she was soaking in liquefied her thought process to raw want. The jutted chin and confidence ensured the crossed the club easily and when she got there, she deemed Raven and Octavia suitably distracted, winding her hands around Clarke’s, locking her wrist in a circle of her fingers.

The ladies’ bathroom wasn’t empty. But it’s occupants were intoxicated and otherwise engaged enough not to notice them in the low light as they urged each other around the corner of the stalls to an expanse of tiled wall where no one was. The steady push and give of Clarke’s pulse under her thumb cooled her head.

The kiss was a awkward fumble of salted lips and the sour tang of half-abandoned drinks, but Lexa clung to the blonde, fingertips whitening on the straps of her top. The cool sting of fingers came to cup her jaw as Clarke tilted her head, Lexa depended the embrace, tongue swiping over her bottom lip and urging them impossibly closer, hips to hips under layers of expensive fabric.

“Lexa,” breathing softly, Clarke swallowed an almost-sigh when the brunette sunk her fingers under the waistband of her skirt. “Slow down.”

Rallying, Lexa retracted herself and it was over quicker than she had initiated it. Clarke pressed a flat palm to the expanse of her silk encased sternum, feeling the reflected _‘thud-thud’_ of her heart and she felt the gentle hum of the laugh that rustled in the blonde’s chest. “As much as I love the attention, we have all night.”

Lexa’s head swum and her stomach cartwheeled and Clarke looped her hands around her neck so that her wrists pressed to the nape of her neck against the cool tiles. When her eyes started to fill, there wasn’t anywhere to go except to turn her chin into her shoulder and blink. All night would turn into all summer, which would soon turn into no time at all, like the grains of sand sifted from a beach, swept into the depths she would flounder and wish she hadn’t been so pretty, so self-absorbed and resentful as to recognise it.

“Lexa,” Clarke directed her back, fingertips on the chiselled line of her jaw, “darling?”

“What if we’re too late?”

“Too late for what?”

Her muscles felt like the turned key of a wind-up toy and she ached to break free and simultaneously cling close.

(Lexa wondered when she would stop being plagued by the constant contradictions that caused the lion’s share of her turmoil).

Sensing this, Clarke stepped back an inch, arms holding fast but allowing room to breath and the brunette was grateful. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and breathed and when she lowered them the blonde’s lashes were wet.

“We’ve got, what, a month? Two? And then you’ll be in California, and I’ll be Connecticut.” She breathed hard enough she could feel her chest constrict. “It’s so _far_ , Clarke.”

“I know,” Clarke’s eyes flickered imperceptibly, avoiding Lexa’s but too fast of a movement to process any of what was in them. “But this is us, Lexa,” she hummed, “we make the most of it.”


	2. Darling, Don't Be Like The Rest Of Them | 6 Years 10 Months ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short psa: this has been six months in the making and I'm so sorry, it took me a while to get my head around--I still don't think it's my best work but honestly, I needed to post it and move on because it wasn't getting any better. What do you guys think?

The hem of Clarke’s skirt hung a full two inches further down her legs than the other girls in her advisory. It was the first thing she noticed, surveying the courtyard that lay at the foot of the middle school cafeteria on her fourth day. As per the school handbook, their uniforms hung starched and immaculate over their gangly pre-teen frames but even Clarke, a complete fish out of water, could see that hems had been altered and blazers had been taken in to sit tighter around their barely there waists. In turn, she fiddled with the boxy fit of her own wine-coloured blazer.

 

It was early enough in September that the doors of the cafeteria with their long glass panes were open but the hall itself was empty—the courtyard instead was where the girls spent their lunch hour. Pleated skirts tucked beneath thighs as they perched on the stone benches bordering the square of concrete in the dip between two buildings and in full view of everyone on the top step, Clarke felt painfully aware of everything that singled her out as the new girl—her too-clean shoes, the bright argyle of her socks and the way her shirt sat stiff-collared at her neck.

She had been in New York for a month. There were still boxes in the hallway of their Madison Avenue apartment and her mother had been spending every spare moment with the decorators, re-papering guest rooms and pulling up the aged carpet that had been left over from the previous owners. In comparison to how well her parents were settling in, Clarke felt like a show and tell thing. She had been claimed on her first day by a trio of girls who looked so alike, it confused her. All of them blonde, with the same eager expression and and matching Fjallraven Kanken backpacks. They spoke for her too, looping their arms through hers and saying  _'this is Clarke, she's from California'_ to anyone who will listen. As a result, she felt more like a commodity than a friend. 

Noticing her foundering, Harper waved her over to where the three of them sat, halfway down the stone steps.

With only ninth grade and above being allowed off campus for lunch, Clarke thought the chance to put themselves above the other girls was their way of clawing back some semblance of power. Or maybe she was reading too much into it. There was sonly one girl who sat above them though—a twig of a brunette with a sharp-faced tenth grader who wore her skirt just short enough not to be pulled up on a uniform violation.

Her hesitation turned heads and Harper’s expression turned politely expectant. Clarke swallowed the deep burn in her cheeks and tried not to think of the way her headband pinched the skin behind her ears. Arranging her face into something apologetic, Clarke mouthed an ‘I’m sorry’ to Harper and strode past them to the far side of the courtyard, seeking out the one girl who didn’t gawk at her for turning down the offer of a seat on the steps like it was the purest form of social suicide. Because maybe it was. But the lip-gloss fumes were going to her head, and Clarke would resign herself to spending the reminder of her days eating in a bathroom stall if it meant having a conversation with someone that didn’t include the words ‘Bergdorfs’ or ‘Blendels’.

When her footsteps on the flagstone didn’t get the girls attention, Clarke plonked her lunch inelegantly down on the stone bench. It was quiet beneath the brick arches that lead away to the science building and if Clarke peered on her tiptoes, she could hear the St. Titus’ bell next door letting the boys out to lunch a half-hour after Polis’ one did.

“I’m Clarke.”

The girl peered at her with wide eyes and shoulders shirked up to her ears—looking over Clarke in her regulation length skirt and her headband with an indecipherable stare that Clarke felt helplessly underdressed beneath. She wondered if she would have more luck talking about the St. Titus mixer with her lip-gloss lackeys.

“You’re in my advisory,” she tried again lamely. Even with the dark flop of hair the girl tried to hide under, Clarke could recognise the features of the girl who sat sulking in the back of her advisory teachers’ classroom. She had never been less than perfectly polite to Clarke when she had smiled, even when most of the girls neglected to acknowledge her presence and it made Clarke inexplicably sad.

“Octavia.”

“That’s very Roman,” Clarke smiled.

“My brother named me,” Octavia stared at her for a long moment, rolling her lip between her teeth and Clarke nodded a little too eagerly, waiting for the significance of it. She expected something important, a ‘my great-aunt Octavia was there when the Empire State building was opened’ or ‘my grandmother Octavia was married to the mayor of New York’. Even in middle school Manhattan seemed to be all about status. Instead, Octavia looked at her, completely blank faced, and said, “my brothers a kiss-ass.”

* * *

Clarke went about the rest of her day, confident in the knowledge she had found the one person in Manhattan not enslaved to the will of Vogue’s best-dressed list.

Octavia had all the hallmarks of the gawky social outcast in a bad tween paperback and though Clarke couldn’t understand why—she wore Tiffany and Co, and was the daughter of Aurora Blake which meant nothing to Clarke but everything to the girls who walked the halls with cursive ‘AB’ insignias on their backpacks and searched for the striking dark hair of the designer in Vanity Fair. It was like, far from sailing through puberty, she was bounding through it in awkward fits and starts that made her lanky and unsure how to interact with the girls who acted like they had it all together and as the new girl, Clarke felt for her. She latched onto like a tether. Octavia delivered scathing reviews of their peers and their families over cream cheese bagels from her brown lunch bag and pointed out the spot beneath the back stairs where the seniors smoked and the teachers ignored them. It was clearly dinner-table talk relayed in conspiratorial tones but Octavia looked so strange repeating it with her childish pout and hushed tone.

She considered it as she shimmied a pair of unflattering culottes over her hips—an hour of field hockey in the park looming. Her peers changed into their phys ed kit in fits and starts, tugging shorts up their legs beneath their skirts and holding their blazers over their shoulders as they unbuttoned their shirts and Clarke crossed her arms over her flat chest in turn.

They took the two minute trek to the pitch with hockey sticks in their hands and stood, bored-faced and bouncing on their hips as the teacher split the group down the middle and assigned one side a pile of red bibs to put on which they did so with sour-faced disdain. The only girl who seemed to be taking the situation seriously was the lanky brunette from the top of the cafeteria steps. She had her shirt tucked neatly into her shorts and a determination in the grim set of her mouth. She would be pretty, Clarke thought, if she wasn’t so busy frowning and wielding her hockey stick like she was going into battle with it

“Octavia,” Clarke hissed, aiming a not-so-subtle elbow into the soft of the girls stomach. Octavia pried her attention away from the teacher with a crease between her brows and ducked her head to hear. “Who’s she?”

“Who’s who?”

“Her,” Clarke jutted her chin in the direction of the girl in question. She had been assigned to Clarke’s team thankfully, and the thought of not having to go head-to-head with her made Clarke’s stomach settle because if it came to it, she was sure she would hand over the ball at the bat of an eyelash.

“Lexa?” Octavia asked, quizzically.

“Lexa,” Clarke parroted.

She looked severe any way Clarke looked at her, despite her lank. Her thick, brunette locks were scraped back into a ponytail fastened against the crown of her head with a regulation width white ribbon and her socks sat neatly under the bony jut of her kneecap. Clarke rubbed a subconscious foot over her own leg where hers had fallen to her ankle, feeling unkempt in contrast to this angular girl with her intent stare. As if she knew Clarke was staring, Lexa pulled her eyes off the teacher long enough to fix her with a stare full of contempt.

Clarke asked Dora to take up her skirt when she got home that day and the maid gave her a dubious look before reluctantly agreeing. 

* * *

Lexa didn’t need a headband to be revered.

A search Clarke conducted on the computer in the half-unpacked study cited her father as the developer and owner of half of the buildings in Manhattan and articles entitled ‘Vanderbilt Family Reunion’ showed shiny, posed photos of three rows of family members lined up in front of the backdrop of an aging mansion. When Clarke zoomed in she saw Lexa in the front row, hands clasped in front of her. The article described her as the daughter of Elizabeth Woods nee Vanderbilt and Michael Woods, the real estate tycoon and heir to a multinational conglomerate and it showed—the set of her smile was neat, her navy polo dress pressed and her hair scraped back likely by some obliging foreign au pair standing out of frame. She had her father’s intensity, Clarke decided, and her mother’s prettiness.

The perfect amalgamation of both of her parents.

At school she was the same. She sat at in the front row of every class with her ankles crossed and her pen poised and Clarke could tell she knew the answers when the teacher asked but she never spoke out of turn—in fact she never spoke at all. She delivered precise answers to questions on rudimentary equations they were given in math and clipped corrections with asked how to make introductions in Spanish but Clarke suspected that her allure of untouchability came with a price—people were too scared to actually talk to her.

Clarke couldn’t accept that.

She was determined and argumentative when she wanted to be. Her mother blamed her father for it and vise versa her father blamed her mother, but regardless of which parent she inherited her hard-headedness from, it landed her on the debate team within the space of a week after the principal had gently suggested she put the energy she spent debunking her English teachers interpretation of ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ to better use and she was glad. According to Octavia’s crash-course, the debate team was deep in Lexa’s realm and she received a hard stare as she turned up to practice in the empty lower school hall on Thursday afternoon. 

It only intensified when Clarke explained she was there under the orders of Mrs. Donahue.

“This isn’t community service, Clarke,” she said sternly, standing above Clarke as she lowered herself onto the straight backed chairs kept in stacks at the back of the drafty hall. 

Even four-foot-six and in knee socks Lexa was formidable. 

She had the stare of a battle-hardened general and Clarke was a chink in a Roman warriors armour that she couldn't straighten out. 

"I know," Clarke shifted on her chair, fingers numbing where she has them jammed beneath her thighs in an effort not to squirm. "I want to be here." 

The admission seemed to be enough for Lexa. More than enough, because her shoulders dropped from their defensive stance and she retreated to her seat across the circle in time for the teacher in charge of the debate team—a skinny woman with wiry glasses that Clarke hadn't had as a teacher yet—to scurry into the room with a binder clasped under her arm. 

Clarke didn't have the finesse with her words that the other girls had when it was her turn to stand and deliver a three minute speech about pigeons without saying 'um' or ah' but she was entertaining enough that Miss. Fletcher assigned her the rebuttal for the up coming mock debate against The Brearly School. She split them into two groups and sent them home with instructions to research arguments for and against the banning of standardised tests in schools.

"You need to enunciate," Lexa appeared at her shoulder, standing ramrod straight with her hands threaded together in front of her in exactly the same pose as in the picture Clarke saw. 

She wondered if Lexa was ever allowed to take a break. 

Clarke stood from where she was carefully sliding the handout into her book-case.

"Okay." 

“You’re a good speaker, Clarke.”

“Says you,” Clarke beamed, tucking a lank lock of hair behind her ear.

“I practice,” Lexa said plainly.

She looked more human in person but not by much. In her uniform with pulled back hair, there was still something glossy and artificial about her—she looked like the artworks hidden beneath glass cases at the Museum of Modern Art that her father pointed out to her on their first weekend in the city. Clarke wished she could shake her like a rag doll. She imagined her hair falling loose and her top button undoing itself, everything in her that kept her so tense and uptight unraveling until a whole person emerged that separated her from her parents in some way, but she kept her hands to herself.

She suspected that Lexa wouldn’t be quick to forgive.

She resolved instead to get to the bottom of Lexa any way she could—anyway that was strictly appropriate of course because Octavia’s suggestion of cornering her in the bathroom to ask what her deal was when she asked to be excused in second period math felt a little bit too ‘public school’ as Harper put it, turning her nose up against the raging stereotype.

Instead, she made a point to acknowledge her once a day until she couldn’t be ignore. A simple ‘hi, Lexa’ on her way to her desk until she was sure that was a smile Lexa was hiding in the right corner of her lips.

* * *

“My parents said I can have a party.”

Peeling the brow paper from the sticky cream cheese of her bagel, Clarke surveyed the response to her statement.

Neither Harper or Zoe had sat on the steps since word got out that Clarke had had a full-blown conversation with Lexa at debate practice on Thursday night, instead laying themselves out on the flagstone of the courtyard while Clarke and Octavia sat on the stone bench like the rulers of their very own kingdom. Clarke had been completely oblivious to her skyrocketing reputation but now that their small corner of the courtyard was gaining members faster with each lunch hour, she wasn’t sure how she felt about the rush of power it gave her.

“A slumber party?” Harper posed.

“I guess,” Clarke shrugged.

The subject of her twelfth birthday had come up over the dinner table two days ago and Clarke could tell that her parents were feeling guilty about uprooting her from San Francisco in the middle of the school year. They had explained it to her at the time—a new opportunity for Jake to earn more money in a bigger city—and Clarke had been so agreeable throughout the whole ordeal she was almost sure that if she asked for a ballet dancing elephant in a bright pink tutu for her birthday they would find a way to give it to her.

“Who’re you inviting?” Octavia asked.

There was an earnest edge to her voice and she looked at Clarke with a wide-eyed stare that she couldn't shake. Clarke learnt quickly that unlike her brother—the unforgiving heartthrob of the tenth grade in the and nerdy in that wealthier than god and heir to his estranged fathers multi media conglomerate way—Octavia wasn’t the kind of person who got invited to things. Most days, it was a fight for the girls who sat with them to notice her anywhere other than at lunch.

“Us?” Zoe piped up quickly.

“Maya,” Harper suggested.

“Bea,” added Zoe.

“Jessica,” Harper remembered.

Clarke pursed her lips and squinted against the harsh angle of the sun to where Lexa sat on the top step in the shade. Octavia maintained that the steps were a hierarchy thing—the higher you sat, the more important you were—but something about Lexa and the no-nonsense way she had approached her after debate practice made Clarke think that she was uninterested in the hierarchy being built around her. She sat on the top step because it was in the shade, and that was it.

It was functional.

Lexa was functional.

Either that, or she was completely oblivious to it, but Lexa didn’t seem like the type to be oblivious to anything

“I want to invite Lexa,” she decided interrupted their tired of suggestions.

She knew she would invite all of them. She would stand in the hall handing out invitations on thick card stock with time, date and her address in delicate cursive to be scrutinised—to hear hushed whispers of ‘Madison? She lives on Madison?’ as they walked away—but if she was going to, she would do it her way.

“Lexa doesn’t come to parties,” Zoe warned in a low pitched voice, as if Lexa was some sort of omnipresent spirit that would smite them at the mention of her name. Which was ridiculous, she thought, because if that was true the entirety of the sixth grade would be piles of ash considering how often she was brought up in their conversations

“She’s not an alien,” Clarke frowned, peering back up at the girl in question. In fact, with her face flushed from the hour of field hockey that had had to endure before lunch she looked positively human.

Zoe looked dubious. “She’s Lexa.”

* * *

Lexa did come.

Clarke tried not to feel smug when she received the RSVP from Elizabeth Woods but when she brought the finalised list of attendees to school the Friday before the party it was with the intention of seeing the look on Zoe Monroe’s face when ‘Lexa Woods’ was at the top of the list in her neat, twelve-year-old print beneath ‘Octavia Blake’.

The Griffin’s apartment was a sight more chaotic than Clarke suspected her friends were used to. Half unpacked and in the midst of being re wallpapered, it hadn’t been her mother’s priority when she had been in the middle of interviewing for the hospital board in their first week in the city and now suddenly was her entire focus after the chance has arisen to host a dinner for her father's firm in a week’s time. But far from putting them off, all it seemed to do was make her more intriguing as they raided the cardboard entombed spare rooms for comforters and spare pillows for the mattresses that had been lined up on the floor of Clarke’s bedroom.

Lexa arrived an hour late wearing a pink polo dress with an embroidered logo in the corner, her hair scraped back and an apology on her lips that her piano lesson had run over time. She had an overnight bag sitting on the marble floor at her feet and a pink-paper wrapped parcel in her hands, fastened with a ribbon and a tag with ‘Clarke’ written on it in rudimentary cursive.

“You must be Michael,” Abby smiled, holding her hand out for the man standing a foot behind Lexa to shake.

“I’m Mr. Woods’ driver,” he shook his head, differing to Lexa who smiled tersely.

“My parents are away on business.”

Something upsetting grabbed at Clarke’s chest at the well-rehearsed sound of the sentence and in that moment she learnt a little bit more about Lexa Woods.

She followed Clarke down the hall stiff-backed and bird-mouthed, shifting beneath the material of her dress when eight pair of eyes turned on her as she entered Clarke’s room—the windows closed rendering it a thick smog of pizza steam and nail polish fumes.

“Clarke, Jessica spilt nail polish on the carpet,” Bea accused.

“Bea knocked it out of my hand.”

“Just put remover on it.”

“That’s not how it works, dummy.”

Clarke fetched a cloth from the bathroom to mop up the damage.

They drifted back to the pairs they had organised themselves into, bottles of nail polish clasped in their palms as they held each others fingers steady and exchanged mindless chatter—how Jessica’s sister was in France and Zoe met a boy from St. Bernard's at soccer that was two years older and asked her to the eighth grade dance.

She wiggled her eyebrows as she said it and Bea turned her nose up.

“That’s disgusting,” Bea decreed.

A smattering of ‘yes’s’ followed.

“Does Bellamy know who he is bringing to prom yet?” Cece asked a moment later.

“Not you, Cee,” Harper quipped.

Octavia’s cheeks burned.

When Clarke looked up, Lexa was perched on her knees staring in wonderment.

Giving Octavia back her hand, she picked two bottles of nail polish out of the purse they sat in and sidled over, plonking herself unceremoniously on her knees in front of the stern-faced brunette with a smile.

“Do you want red,” she shook the bottle, “or silver?”

“Nail polish is a uniform violation, Clarke,” Lexa reminded her needlessly.

Clarke tsked.

Shaking her head, she pried Lexa’s fingers from where they were fisted in the hem of her dress and undid the cap of the red nail polish with an expert hand. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” she piqued a brow in challenge and placed the cap between her teeth, drawing her knees to her chest so she could place Lexa’s right hand, palm down across her knee cap.

This close—drawn up to her so that she could dig the brush into the corner of her nail—Lexa could feel the laboured exhale of her breathing and smell the crisp scent of detergent in the collar of her dress. She imagined Lexa’s entire life smelt like that—the falsified, bleached, purified kind of smell, masked by floral perfume that was likely her mother's imported from Paris or Milan. Clarke was sure that it would drive her to distraction.

“I like your necklace,” she murmured, indicating the to chain holding the delicate gold cross she could see nestled in the hollow of Lexa’s neck.

Lexa reached up to touch it with her free hand, as if she had forgotten it was there.

“It was my grandmothers.”

“It’s pretty,” Clarke decided, eyes flicking up before settling.

The right corner of Lexa’s lips twitched, then settled.

“My Mother says I look like her.”

“She must have been pretty.”

Lexa stiffened and Clarke realised a moment too late the implication of her observation.

She shrugged, aiming for nonchalance as she clawed her way out of the hole she had created for herself.

“My grandmother was blind as a bat and couldn’t hear a thing.”

“Clarke!” Lexa admonished nowhere near stern enough for Clarke to believe she was in any way appalled. Her voice lost its serious timbre and went high-pitched and airy and Clarke pounced on the first flicker of humanity she had seen in this twig of a girl who seemed to hold the weight of her reputation on her shoulders.

“My Dad says I remind him of her too,” she grinned.

“That’s a lie,” Lexa challenged.

“Nope,” Clarke popped the ‘p’, “he says I have ‘selective listening’.”

“That I believe,” Lexa amended cheekily, squawking when Clarke gave her an offended swat.

“Traitor,” she decided, mouth in an affronted ‘o’. “I thought you were on my side.”

She finished Lexa’s nails with a stupid flourish of her hand that made her smile widen and was about to offer to do her toes as well when Zoe—all four sets of nails painted and shuffling on her heels so as not to smudge it on the carpet—suggested they play spin the bottle with the empty bottle of nail polish remover hiding under the edge of Clarke’s dresser.

“You need boys for that,” Cece argued, turning her nose up.

“What?” Zoe arranged her lips into a faux-sultry pout, “are you scared you’ll end up in the closet with me?”

“We could play truth or dare?” Harper suggested quickly.

“Have you never kissed a girl before Cee?” Zoe smirked at the dark red hue on Cece’s cheeks.

Clarke fought the urge to roll her eyes and snap. She was fast learning that Zoe had a penchant for exaggeration if her story about the St. Bernard's boy was to be believed, because Clarke had it on good authority that Zoe was the one talking to him after soccer practice and not he other way around.

“Like you have,” Clarke scoffed.

“I have,” Zoe insisted, lips turning into a frown.

They discarded spin the bottle in favour of ‘Miss Congeniality’ and Clarke shuffled to the furthest side of her bed when it came time to sleep for Lexa—as the latecomer saddled with the unfortunate consequence of having to share Clarke’s double—to climb in. She stood stiff-backed and ghost-like next to the bed, the white flannel of her pyjamas washing her out in the half-light from the street and hands fisted in the hem of her pyjama shirt. An unhappy expression on her face when Clarke explained the situation.   

“I can sleep on the floor,” she offered at Lexa’s evident discomfort.    

The rest of the girls had grown quiet—the shuffle of comforters had settled—and Lexa peered at them anxiously before steeling her resolve.

She woke with a leg wedged between hers that wasn’t her own. 

* * *

In advisory on Monday morning the nail polish was gone.

Lexa stood, stern-faced and aloof in the hallway as she told Clarke in no uncertain terms that they weren't friends.

Clarke almost believed her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come [talk](https://thealmostending.tumblr.com/ask) to me on tumblr if you want to ([@thealmostending](https://thealmostending.tumblr.com/)) otherwise thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on tumblr if you want to ([@thealmostending](https://thealmostending.tumblr.com/)) otherwise thanks for reading! comments and kudos appreciated!


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